Aunt Sis

My Aunt, Carmen, was the only girl in the family for a long time before Harriet came along, and she was usually just called "Sis" or "Sister" by the six boys she helped raise. I always called her "Aunt Sis" and never thought twice about the oddity of it. It's possible that her given name simply didn't fit her well. My grandmother was either Dutch as she said or Deutsch, a short, round woman, but she must have loved Spanish-sounding names for her girls since she named the other "Harriet Arlena Maria". Big, chunky Carmen with her thin yellow-blonde hair looked much more Teutonic than anything else.

It's odd how little about the woman herself stands out for me. Somehow I seem to not have liked her very much, although it might have been that she and my mother didn't care for one another. Maybe not. Maybe it was just that she was such a country woman. My grandmother was country, too, but there was a bit of leavening about her.

Aunt Sis was married twice but never had any children. I don't remember much at all about her second husband, probably because when they married they moved "away over Bon Aqua way" and so wasn't around the homeplace quite as much. I have the vaguest memory of a suspicion that she was much happier that way. Perhaps it was just that she had finally caught her a man who'd given her a real little house with city plumbing.

She must have been something of an old maid when she married the first time. My early memories of her are along the lines of "young wife", even though she was older than any of the others except Uncle Jethro. I liked her first husband. Probably because of his name. You have to understand the accent I grew up with, and it is difficult to convey, but it is nothing like the "Southern" you hear in movies and on TV; not much like Clinton's, although that is closer. A bit like East Texas with a little lilt to it, very sing-song, flat a's and hard r's. So that Thomas Lamasters came out as something like Tom-miss la-Mas-Tiss. He was usually called by his full name,too, probably to distinguish him from my uncle John Thomas (sometimes called "John" and sometimes "Tom" and by his wife, "Johnny"), and the however many other Toms and Thomases there were in the area.

They first lived with his father in a cabin right up at the source of Yellow Creek, where the gravel road was little more than a wagon trace crossing the creek. It was an old cabin, around a hundred years, and looked more like a shed than a house. It was what I believe is called single pen, but separated into two rooms with the old man's room in the back, a curtain made from flour sack covering the doorway. Aunt Sis and Uncle Thomas had their bed in the front room, which was also the kitchen and living room. The foundation was undressed rock, and there was a distinct list to the place. There was no well, so water had to be carried from the creek, upstream of the place where the road crossed it. The water bucket hung from the porch post, a knobby bark-peeled thing, smooth with wear. Above the bucket there was a nail for hanging the long handled gourd dipper. My grandmother's dipper was tin and gave the water a metallic taste I was used to. Drinking from the gourd was different; the taste was flat, but the texture was unlike anything else. An adventure. I think that even at the time I considered the place exotic.

Later, whether to have a life of their own, or because the old man had died, I can't remember, they moved down the road a bit, to rent the dogtrot house across from the Primitive Baptist Church by the bridge. A dogtrot is sort of like two cabins under one roof with a breezeway in between. This one had porches running the length of the house both front and back, and was sited beneath a huge, upright oak. It was simple, but comfortable. They couldn't have lived there very long, though, before he died and she moved back to live with my grandmother.

That's the way I remember it. I may be wrong.

I Never Sang For M.I.C.K.E.Y.

It is a beautiful October day, and oh, yes I do love October. If I could sing it right, then I would sing.


When I was eight or nine or ten, I sang. In the back yard, I sang, swinging. And, Joan, my next-door neighbor and I used the doghouse roof as a stage for song and dance numbers. (A favorite was the Gillette Razor Theme Song from the Friday Night Fights.) The picnic table was off limits because, "somebody might want to eat on there some day." I remember wanting the car windows down so when I sang the Mickey Mouse Club Talent Scouts would be able to hear me. I liked Doris Day in the fifties.

I wasn't the only one around the house who sang. My Mama did, too. But only when she was depressed or angry. I don't know why. She must have liked music, she had played french horn in one of her high school marching bands and had a letter. (Mama tended to get kicked out of schools. She had a temper.) But when she was singing around the house, or whistling, she usually chose bad hymns and--not blues--depressing songs, like "... if I had the wings of an angel, over these prison walls I would fly." She rarely knew whole sets of words, and so would sing what she did know over and over again. To this day, hearing someone begin to whistle in the house for no reason makes me want to find a place to cower. I wonder what will follow.


There is only one time I remember Daddy singing. I'd been with him down to Dickson to see the relatives. Mama and Glenn had stayed in town for some reason. It was late summer and within a week or two I would be going away to college. Going away anywhere for the first time. At some point, about three quarters of the way home, he started up on "Red River Valley".

From this valley they say you are going.
I will miss your bright eyes and sweet smile.
For they say you are taking the sunshine
That has brightened our pathway awhile.

Come and sit by my side if you love me.
Do not hasten to bid me adieu
But remember the Red River Valley
And the cowboy that loves you so true.

This from my never-affectionate, barely expressive father. Don't ask me what I said. I was seventeen and conversation with Daddy usually turned on books and bicycles and fishing, anything but emotion.

So, I suppose somewhere along the line it impressed itself on me that singing (outside of the irrepressible beer drenched crowd tuning in a bar or the spirit soaked counterpart Sunday morning) has to be laden with important emotion. Something heavy.